Push Back Against the Elements With New Flexible, Super-Strong Umbrella

Made entirely of recyclable polypropylene, the Ginkgo Umbrella is engineered to withstand stresses that quickly wreck the standard style.

Anyone who has spent time in blustery, rainy climates knows the frustration of an umbrella defeated by the elements. In 2009, designer Federico Venturi experienced this frustration firsthand and, instead of throwing away the broken umbrella like everyone else does, decided to use it as inspiration for everything an umbrella should not be.

Venturi teamed up with mechanical engineer Gianluca Savalli in Rome and over the course of three years, developed a 100 percent recyclable umbrella made called Ginkgo. The fact that it’s recyclable is a perk—the key that sets Ginkgo apart from other umbrellas is its polypropylene construction. The entire umbrella is made from this completely recyclable plastic, which is both lightweight and resistant to stress and chemical agents.

Marco Righi, Ginkgo’s management engineer, says the idea to use polypropylene came from old-school Bosch hinges on drill cases created from injection molding. Those were also made with polypropylene, allowing them to be molded as two halves made in a single piece, bending without losing functionality — exactly what umbrellas need to do.

This task did not come without challenges. The team had to rethink an umbrella’s construction entirely; normal umbrellas made from metal, plastic and wood contain about 120 parts, and so they redesigned the Ginkgo with injection molding to only have 20 parts connected by snap-fit joints and hinges.

Instead of being made with many metal parts, Ginkgo’s stretchers are cut from a single piece of polypropylene plastic.

The hardest piece of the puzzle was the stretcher, says Righi. After a series of trials and tests, they were able to make the stretchers out of a single piece of flexible plastic that bends to wind and force, absorbs impact and returns to its original state.

“At the beginning we used CNC milling to prototype it, which is a quite expensive technology, and not so suitable for plastic materials such as polypropylene,” Righi says. “We sped up the process using water jet technology to cut the stretcher’s 2D shape from a 5mm thick plate. We were able to produce tens of prototypes with different solutions thanks to this technique, until we finally found the best one, which is the core of our patent.”

When they went to patent their creation, they found designs for plastic umbrellas dating back to the 60s and 80s. Few have tried to reinvent the mechanics of an umbrella since then, as most people don’t try to fix something that isn’t really broken. But the Ginkgo team felt the umbrella is broken, and evidence of it is piling up. Ginkgo’s research found that the number of umbrellas discarded incorrectly each year could build 25 Eiffel Towers. If that’s even partly true, the Ginkgo’s benefits would be twofold: Eventually the number of wasted umbrellas would steadily decline, and we’d get an umbrella that wouldn’t crack under the slightest pressure from wind and rain.

With just more than two weeks left of their Indiegogo campaign, the Ginkgo team passed their first goal of $30,000, allowing them to make the first series of Ginkgo umbrellas. Righi says they’re looking to create different lines of Ginkgo umbrellas next, such as compact umbrellas. For now, we’ll take the full size Ginkgo to brighten up our rainy walk to work, and to hopefully prevent us from getting soaked.

With just 20 parts, all completely recyclable, Ginkgo is a simplified approach to the conventional umbrella. And it’s colorful, too.